To let: spacious country, in need of some refurbishment

They are the ghost towns of Ireland. Huge estates, half-built and rotting. We meet the families marooned in a broken landscape

The Silver Birches - one of many Irish estates left to rot in the recession (Richard Smith)
They are hard to avoid. The ghost houses that haunt the entrance to every
Irish village or small country town, and encircle every city. Row upon row
of wide-eyed, curtain-less, brand new houses. Patiently they await the
families who will never come, children who will never play, and washing that
will never be hung on the line. Not homes, but the gravestones of Ireland’s
so-called Celtic Tiger.

In Sli Corglass, an estate in the lush farmlands of County Longford in the
centre of the country, luxuriant gorse bushes have grown 5ft tall in the
wild front gardens. Inside, each house is frozen at its own particular
moment of disrepair, when the workers downed tools and fled, realising their
wages and their jobs were gone. Half-painted, half-plastered, half-plumbed,
and worthlessly half-finished. Brand-new doors, nails, shiny cupboard
handles, electric switches and the departed workers’ sweet wrappers and Coke
cans are strewn across